Top 10 liberal race cards

Liberals are starting to hear the dog-whistles they say conservatives slip into their conversations as racial code words and have discovered an amazing array of such language relating to criticism of President Obama. Be prepared to cut down on your vocabulary after seeing the list of these liberal race cards.

1. Chicago

MSNBC host Chris Matthews put Chicago on the table as a term that conjures up stereotypical images of the inner city. “They keep saying Chicago by the way, have you noticed? They keep saying Chicago. That’s another thing that sends that message—this guy’s helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the ‘burbs.” On the panel with Matthews, John Heilemann of New York Magazine, then chirped in, “There’s a lot of black people in Chicago.”

2. Birther jokes

Matthews said that Mitt Romney’s joke that “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” was part of an “endless ethnic attack” on Obama. “That cheap shot … was awful,” Matthews said to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. “It is an embarrassment to your party to play that card … you are playing that ethnic card there.”

3. Polling

Leave it to noted political scholar and “30 Rock” TV-star Alec Baldwin to put his finger on opinion polling as a hitherto form of virulent racism. Still using electronic devices after the embarrassing voice-mail rant he once sent to his daughter (where he famously called her a “rude thoughtless pig”), Baldwin recently tweeted, “If Obama Was White, He’d Be Up By 17 Points.”

4. Golf

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joked that Obama was “working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour,” MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell knew what was really going on: racism. “Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the—lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama. … these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.”

5. Financial reform

Vice President Joe Biden warned a campaign rally in Danville, Va., which included a large number of minorities, that Romney’s financial reform efforts would essentially re-introduce slavery to the nation. “In the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules—unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

6. Voter ID laws

Republican efforts to rid voter rolls of felons, illegal immigrants, and dead people is really just all about racism, say liberals ranging from MSNBC host Al Sharpton to Attorney General Eric Holder. Sharpton said that voter ID laws were a “deliberate attempt to try to suppress our votes in particularly minority communities that are disproportionately impacted, senior and students,” while Holder likened the laws to the Jim Crow era “poll taxes.”

7. Eric Holder’s contempt charge

Writing in the Huffington Post, Al Sharpton gave a lengthy discourse to a charge that the contempt of Congress charged voted on by the House was similar to New York police’s “stop-and-frisk” policy. “Tattered down and publicly humiliated, AG Holder has been mishandled just like the young Black and Latino men (and women) who are demonized on our streets everyday…”

8. Welfare fraud

Matthews went on this soliloquy that blamed any opposition to social anti-poverty programs to deep-rooted racism. “Nothing is more primitive than to beat the drums of tribal grievance,” Matthews said. “Welfare cheating, food stamp grabbing are all part of the lingo, along with the old calls for law and order and states rights and all the rest. Say what you want, the message is familiar, deeply redolent of the old demagoguery that stirs up the working white people against the black.”

9. Branding analogies

When Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said, “While I would love for Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt, I thought he did what he was supposed to do,” about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s keynote address at the Republican National Convention, liberal commentators were quick to criticize the remarks, saying Barbour was essentially calling for a branding of the nation’s first black president. Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall tweeted, “Archaic klan torture techniques.”

10. Anger references

When Mitt Romney said that President Obama should take his “campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago,” MSNBC co-host Toure heard a racial diatribe. “He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us. … You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”